Belts are commonly vended by suspending them from belt racks. Generally, the belts are arranged on the racks by size, with various styles of belts being co-mingled within a given size. The advantage of displaying belts on a rack, as opposed to packaging them in boxes, is that a customer can view the entire belt and try it on without the necessity of having to remove it from the box. When it is removed from a box, the customer may not necessarily replace it in the box, when placing the box back on a counter.
One of the problems of utilizing earlier types of belt racks is that quite often, customers will remove the belt from its suspending bar, and replace the belt on a different bar. Quite often, the belt is not replaced with belts of a similar size. This creates a major problem for a store attempting to maintain inventory of given sizes of belts, and in addition, it prevents a customer from noticing that a belt in his/her size is available, since he/she will only look at belts on the portion of the rack containing his/her size.
One partial solution to the aforementioned problem has been the provision of a color-coding system for the belts. Utilizing the color-coded system, all of the belts that are on display are provided with a color code which separates belts as to size. For instance, all small belts would be coded brown, all medium belts would be coded yellow, all large belts would be coded red, and all extra large belts would be coded green. In this way, the store can maintain the integrity of the sizes by arranging the belts in their proper colors.
One problem remaining with the aforementioned coding system is that there is no way of segregating the belts as to style. Thus, sport belts, dress belts, fabric belts, etc. will all be co-mingled under a given size. This creates an inconvenience for the customer who is only looking for a particular style of belt. Furthermore, the store has no ready way of maintaining inventory between different styles because all of the styles are co-mingled within a given size range. The store can accordingly have twelve belts of one style in a given size, while only having one belt of a different style in the same size. That problem has been obviated by my earlier invention which is subject of U.S. Pat. No. 4,253,576, now expired, whose disclosure is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
That invention comprises a fixture supporting plural belt racks thereon for display in vending. The belt racks comprise a plurality of sections, with each of the sections having indicia thereon, the indicia comprising a different color for each section, each section having a plurality of spokes thereon and a plurality of hang tags for suspending belts from the spokes, with each hang tag in a given section having the same color as the color indicium of the section, and with the colors being used to separate the belts by style. For example, all sport belts would be coded black, all dress belts would be coded blue, and all fabric belts would be coded purple. In this way, the store can maintain the integrity of the styles by arranging the belts in their proper colors.
The one problem remaining with the aforementioned coding system is that there's no system for segregating the belts as to both style and size. Thus, when using a color-coding system where all of the belts that are on display are provided with a color code which separates belts as to size, different styles of belts will be co-mingled under a given size, which creates an inconvenience for the customer who is only looking for a particular style of belt. Likewise, under a color-coding system where all the belts that are on display are provided with a color code which separates belts as to the style, belts of different sizes will be co-mingled under a given style, creating an inconvenience for the customer who is only looking for a particular size, and the customer will only look at belts on the portion of the rack believed to be containing his/her size.
Hence, a need presently exists to provide a fixture for a rack of belts that can be easily segregated as to both style and size.